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Jas P

Stop Trying to Protect Your Business Ideas - NYTimes.com - 0 views

  • Your Idea Already Exists: There are very few truly new ideas. Most ideas are an improvement or a different take on an existing idea. Regardless of how much is new, the chances are that if you have thought of it, others have as well.
  • Being New Can Be a Problem: If you have a truly new idea, you are in many ways at a disadvantage. Being first to market means you have to educate consumers, and that can be expensive.
  • The Value Is Not in the Idea: The competitive landscape is very different than it was 30 years ago, back when ideas had some merit on their own. Now, there are so many businesses out there, and so much information, that an idea by itself is worth zero.
Jas P

Nobody's going to steal your idea - 0 views

  • I think Howard Aiken got it right: Don’t worry about people stealing your ideas. If your ideas are any good, you’ll have to ram them down people’s throats.
  • One thing I’ve learned from developing software is that it’s very difficult to transfer ideas. A lot of software projects never completely transition from the original author because no one else really understands what’s going on.
  • And when other people do have your idea, they still have to implement it. That’s the hard part. We all have more ideas than we can carry out. The chance that someone else will have your idea and have the determination to execute it is tiny.
Jas P

Start something small - 0 views

  • I prepared a short talk. I called it ‘How to Win Friends and Influence People.’ I say ‘short.’ It was short in the beginning, but it soon expanded to a lecture that consumed one hour and thirty minutes.
  • Here’s how the now famous book became a reality: we started with a set of rules printed on a card no larger than a postcard. The next season we printed a larger card, then a leaflet, then a series of booklets, each one expanding in size and scope. After fifteen years of experimentation and research came this book.
  • What I’m starting to notice more and more, is that great things almost always start small.
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  • I find similarly that some of the most important achievements I’ve made started as little projects.
  • I was pleasantly surprised when Paul Graham wrote a comment in the discussion on my recent article which suggested similar: Don’t even try to build startups. That’s premature optimization. Just build things that seem interesting. The average undergraduate hacker is more likely to discover good startup ideas that way than by making a conscious effort to work on projects that are supposed to be startups.
Jas P

How to Get Startup Ideas - 0 views

  • I made it myself. In 1995 I started a company to put art galleries online. But galleries didn't want to be online. It's not how the art business works.
Jas P

Reaching the Startup Holy Grail: Product-Market Fit | Michael Karnjanaprakorn - 0 views

  • Product/market fit means being in a good market with a product that can satisfy that market. You can always feel when product/market fit isn’t happening. The customers aren’t quite getting value out of the product, word of mouth isn’t spreading, usage isn’t growing that fast, press reviews are kind of “blah”, the sales cycle takes too long, and lots of deals never close. And you can always feel product/market fit when it’s happening. The customers are buying the product just as fast as you can make it — or usage is growing just as fast as you can add more servers. Money from customers is piling up in your company checking account.
Jas P

Distribution Hacks - 0 views

  • “Hi Elle, what’s the angle?”
  • “Arbitrage on parsing shipping data,” I reply. “Well, everyone has an angle.”
  • My Dad explained that hedge funds are truly a dime-a-dozen in the finance world, not dissimilar from angel investors.
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  • Then he said the thing that was THE THING: You can do a hedge fund anytime, why do it now? Well thanks Dad, for the vote of confidence (more like “holy fuck you think I could raise hundreds of millions of dollars in this economy!?”), but what do I do with that?
  • He continued to explain that creating a hedge fund, or any kind of fund, was something i should be thinking about in my 40s or 50s when I wanted a more traditional role in finance with a lower risk/reward profile.
  • My family is upper middle class, but as service providers to the very wealthy I’ve learned some valuable things about money, at a much younger age than I otherwise would.
  • It has changed how I approach people with money, for better or for worse. I expect this will have an interesting impact on my ability to raise funding for my company (and I’m not saying all positive here):
  • “Yes but what do we sell?”
  • “We sell trust, honey,” he smiles. “We’re honest people just like the steel workers, union laborers, and employees these companies serve. We help them keep their promises.”
  • A series of deaths in my family in the past couple years have made me more aware of mortality than I ever was before. My Dad pointed out, as we discussed the hedge fund business, that it was something I could do without actually leaving a chair. Move to New York, get a Blackberry, iPhone and 3-line desk phone and I could operate from anywhere.
  • But I would never be able to recapture, at 50, the energy of being 25. My Dad had me when he was 28. To him, I am so early in my life (I’m 27 now… this post reflects on a convo 2 years ago).
  • Staring down Demo Day, I hold this conversation in my mind. Have some balls, Elle. I’m pretty sure that’s what he was trying to say.
Jas P

Must-read for founders: A VC explains how to build a killer value proposition | Venture... - 0 views

  • In its simplest terms, a value proposition is a positioning statement that describes for whom you do what uniquely well. It describes your target buyer, the problem you solve, and why you’re distinctly better than the alternatives. One of the classic mistakes of building a value proposition is diving headlong into the solution definition phase before really understanding the problem you’re looking to solve. To understand whether it’s a problem worth solving, I recommend exercising four U’s: Is the problem unworkable? Does your solution fix a broken business process where there are real, measureable consequences to inaction? Is fixing the problem unavoidable? Is it driven by a mandate with implications associated with governance or regulatory control? For example, is it driven by a fundamental requirement for accounting or compliance? Is the problem urgent? Is it one of the top three priorities? In selling to enterprises, you’ll find it hard to command the attention and resources to get a deal done if you fall below this line. Is the problem underserved? Is there a conspicuous absence of valid solutions to the problem you’re looking to solve? Focus where there’s whitespace, not scorched earth.
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